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Friday, October 22, 2010

Yet another nice new feature in Lync is the ability for Enterprise Voice enabled users to choose their own music that's played when they put someone on hold.

From the Lync client, click on the Options "gear" icon and go to Ringtones and Sounds. If the logged on user is enabled for Enterprise Voice, the last option should be Play music on hold. Users not enabled for Enterprise Voice won't see the option to use music on hold. For enabled users, you'll notice that it's greyed out by default.

To enable this setting, you need to edit your Lync Client Policy to allow music on hold. Client policies replace the Group Policy Objects that were used in Communicator 2007 R2 to enable/disable features in the client. These policies can be global, or they can be limited to groups or even individual users.

You manage client policies via Lync Powershell. Assuming you haven't created any ﻿client policies, there will be a single one called Global. To see the current settings of the Global client policy, type:

Get-CSClientPolicy Global

The setting we're interested in is EnableClientMusicOnHold. By default, this is set to FALSE. Set it to TRUE by typing:

Set-CSClientPolicy Global -EnableClientMusicOnHold:$TRUE

Log off and back onto the Lync client and the Play music on hold dialog box should be enabled. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be a way to allow the user to check or uncheck this option. It's either enabled or disabled by the policy, and can't be modified by the user.

If you've previously installed beta versions of Lync (pre-RC), you'll notice the path to the music file is probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communicator\Media\DefaultHold.wma. If you browse to this location, you'll find it doesn't exist. The actual path to the default hold music file is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Lync\Media\DefaultHold.wma.

Now, when you put someone on hold, they will get a nice soothing melody while they anxiously await your return. Note that this setting is computer-specific, meaning that if you have Lync running on multiple machines, you'll have to make sure the path is set correctly on all computers, and the media file exists in that location.

If you don't want to use the default hold music, you're free to use any piece of music that suits your taste. The caveat here is that the selected music file must be in WMA format. Bitrate-wise, I've tested a few different files, and it hasn't had any trouble with them - variable or constant bit rate, stereo and up to 192 kbps. Your mileage may vary. If you're looking for a tool to convert MP3 to WMA, I suggest Audacity.

If you don't trust your users to select appropriate hold music, you can assign an audio file using the MusicOnHoldAudioFile parameter in Set-CSClientPolicy.

If you assign this setting, users won't be able to change the hold music. To allow users to change the audio file, you have to clear the setting by assigning the $NULL value or "" to the MusicOnHoldAudioFile parameter.

Friday, October 15, 2010

NOTE (June 2011): While the general idea around least cost routing hasn't changed, the process required to use the Dialing Rule Optimizer has been greatly simplified and enhanced since I originally created this post. See this post for the most up-to-date information on how to best use the Dialing Rule Optimizer. I do encourage you to read on for general background information on how least-cost routing works.

Companies that have a number of offices spread across a wide geographical area often wish to leverage something called Least Cost Routing to reduce their telephony costs. Least Cost Routing is the process of selecting the cheapest telephony route for a given call. If you're a company with offices spread over a wide area, it makes sense to route your calls so that you avoid long-distance changes whenever possible.

Say you are in a company with offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Dallas and Miami. If you're in the Toronto office and you need to call someone in the Miami area, it can be much cheaper to route your call over the WAN to your Miami office and then out to the PSTN. What would have been a long-distance call is now a local one.

Traditionally, it's been extremely tedious to implement Least Cost Routing effectively. You need to obtain lists of all the local calling areas for all your offices, massage the data into something your telephony system understands, and then import that data. Keeping track of changes can be challenging at best, and near impossible at worst. Publicly available lists such as those from http://www.localcallingguide.com/ make obtaining the raw data relatively easy, but manually working that data into something manageable is extremely difficult.

Since its not a full Lync 2010 environment from end to end, I expected certain Lync 2010 features would simply not work. One of those long awaited features is the ability to transfer files between users who are on different firewalled networks.

In OCS 2007 R2 and older versions, people were often frustrated by the inability for Communicator to transfer files between users who were not on the same network. File transfers worked peer-to-peer, and if the clients couldn't reach each other directly via their local IP address, then the file transfer would fail with a message like this:

You cannot receive the file ChuckNorrisFacts.doc from Chuck Norris. This may be due to firewall restrictions or network problems. If you need further assistance, please contact your system administrator.

In Lync 2010, file transfers between users on disparate networks will work, because Lync 2010 is a lot smarter about finding a routable network path to the other party. Lync will use ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) and SDP (Session Description Protocol) to find a media path to send file data in much the same way that Communicator used ICE/SDP for voice/video traffic. For an excellent description on how Communicator uses ICE/SDP, read this post by the Communications Server team.

I had assumed you would need to use the Lync client in conjunction with a Lync edge server for file transfer to work properly. To my surprise, I found that a Lync edge server is NOT a required component. The Lync client does all the ICE/SDP work to find a routable media path. When either party is behind a firewall and can't be reached directly from the other user, Lync will use the existing OCS/Lync edge server to act as a proxy.

I confirmed this by reviewing the Lync client logs on my machine. By the way, its very handy to turn on logging in Lync. It can be very useful when troubleshooting, or in this case, just trying to figure out how things are working. Digging through the Communicator-uccaip-0.uccapilog file in my Tracing folder (they still haven't updated the names of the log files for Lync), I could see the following IP candidates offered by the other client just prior to the transfer:

I won't go into the details of each of these candidate lines because the Communications Server Team does such a great job explaining it, but the 10.1.1.71 address is the internal address of the other user, while the 209.2.2.23 address is the external AV edge IP address of my OCS 2007 R2 edge server. You can see that several of the candidates are offering to use the AV edge IP address to relay the file transfer data from the other user's internal IP address.

So, to make a long story short, it appears that you won't have to wait to have a fully deployed Lync Server 2010 infrastructure to start taking advantage of the vastly improved file-transfer abilities in the Lync client.

Monday, October 4, 2010

If you've used the Dialing Rule Optimizer to create localized dialing rules for your Audiocodes/Dialogic gateway or OCS/Lync, you may have noticed the option to enter your email address. The ONLY reason I use your email address is to automatically notify you when there have been changes in the dialing rules. I will never sell or give your email address to anyone.

As of right now, I do a monthly check for all those people who have entered their email address on the first of the month, and the program automatically sends them the updated rules. For instance, this month I sent out updated rulesets to almost half of all the users who entered their email address.

Surprisingly, the local calling area for a given telephone exchange is updated on a pretty frequent basis, which means that your dialing rules could be out of date. Your users might not be able to complete calls to newly added telephone exchanges.

Allowing me to contact you via email is also handy for when I make changes in the logic to improve the rule generation process or to fix an error that may result in an incomplete ruleset.

On another note, if you ever find an error or inconsistency in the ruleset, PLEASE let me know so I can investigate. Based on the lack of feedback so far, I can either assume that the program is working perfectly (which I'd like to think is the case), people are not validating the results, or they are simply tossing it out and not using it at all.

So, check out and use the Dialing Rule Optimizer, and enter your email address so you can stay up-to-date, and send me a note to give me some feedback :)

Friday, October 1, 2010

I thought I'd pass along my experience with some undocumented UM changes in Exchange 2010 SP1 that recently caused a client some grief.

This particular client has made extensive use of UM dial plans and auto attendants, with it all tied in to a Cisco Call Manager telephony environment. The way they configured their AAs wasn't done in a manner recommended by Microsoft. Specifically, they didn't consistently assign Dialing Rule Groups to their AAs.

If you're not familiar with Dialing Rule Groups, they are essentially groupings of dialing rules used to determine the types of calls that users can make when they make outgoing calls via Exchange UM. For instance, you might have a dialing rule group that contains a set of rules that only allows local calls. According to MS Best Practices, every dial plan and auto attendant should have at least one dialing rule group assigned to handle every possible combination of numbers it is expected to see.

The UM Dial Plans used by this client were almost exclusively set to 4 digits. Many of the AAs had key mappings (ie Press 1 to reach Sales) that routed to 7-digit extensions. There were no dialing rule groups in place on the AAs. In Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 RTM, this didn't seem to matter. The auto attendants always routed the calls properly.

However, once we put in SP1, all the auto attendants that routed calls to extensions with more than 4 digits failed. Users would get to the main menu, press the button corresponding to the key mapping and get a message saying the call could not be completed, and the caller was returned to the main menu.

After much sweating, hand-wringing and a call to MS Premier Support, we determined that we required a dialing rule group on each of the auto attendants that routed to 7-digit extensions. Once done, calls were routed as before.

The Microsoft support rep said that the AAs should never have worked using the configuration this client had in place. However, this client had successfully used this method in both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 RTM. It was only Exchange 2010 SP1 where this became an issue. One way you could look at it is that Exchange 2010 SP1 corrected an logical oversight in previous versions.

So, in essense, make sure your dial plans and auto attendants are configured according to Microsoft's Best Practices BEFORE upgrading to Exchange 2010 SP1.

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About Me

I'm the Lync Product Master at Event Zero and a Lync MVP. My specialties (surprise, surprise) include Lync and Exchange. I worked at Microsoft a long, long LONG time ago as a support tech, and am pretty sure they installed a chip in my skull during one of the awesome parties they had back then. To give you an idea on how long ago I worked at MS, the first product I supported was MS-DOS 6.2! I moved on to greener pastures shortly after Windows 95 hit the scene, but still look back with fondness at those carefree days. I can be contacted via email at klasko@lyncoptimizer.com.